8/25/2023 0 Comments Quip coupon subwayMeanwhile, it seems as if the outlays of the wealthy are getting more and more recherché. Scenarios more Dickensian than Jacobin are playing out in schools as a result one New Jersey school district barred students with more than $75 in school lunch debt from attending prom, field trips, and extracurricular activities, then denied a local donor the opportunity to pay down the entirety of students’ debt. While adulterated wine might not be our biggest problem as a society, the country has a very real crisis of hunger simmering in our cities and towns some 37 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2018, according to data newly released by the USDA, including six million children. It’s no wonder that Twitter wags and street protesters are embracing the guillotine aesthetic America feels frayed by its own striation. Two hundred years later, Rousseau’s bon mot still resonates on social media, at political rallies, in the streets, and in our secret hearts, the carnivorous id of class struggle is surging up again to prominence. “When the people shall have nothing more to eat,” Rousseau apocryphally quipped, “they will eat the rich.” In the ten-volume History of the French Revolution, author Adolphe Thiers summed up the spirit of the era with a quote by the then late famous social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Citizens complained that speculative merchants were selling moldy bread, adulterated wine, and diseased, blood-bloated meat to the poor, saving their best wares for the wealthy. With the monarch bloodily dispatched, the people had found they could eat neither rights nor freedom, and lacked sufficient bread to enjoy either. But years into the new order, the people were still restive and unsettled: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have been passed by the National Assembly, and the king himself executed by guillotine, but there still wasn’t enough food to go around. It was a transitional time of declarations and riots, blood spilled, and unchecked, revolutionary hope-and a new, more equitable form of government was blossoming into being in the capital. A few years earlier, citizens irate over poverty, a grinding and brutal famine, and disenfranchisement had toppled the monarchy and smashed the Bastille fortress, sending shockwaves throughout Europe and the world. In 1793, the streets of Paris were in an uproar.
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